Milton, blind, dictating to his daughters, created an epic that reimagines the Fall with such sympathy for Satan that generations of readers have wondered whether the devil is secretly the hero. The blank verse is architecturally magnificent, sentences spanning dozens of lines, syntax suspending and releasing like a vast musical structure. The domestic scenes in Eden before the Fall achieve a tenderness Milton never managed in his own marriages. It is the greatest long poem in English, and it changed what English could do.